Nobody's Slave (4 page)

‘Tom! Help!’ He looked down, between his feet, and saw Simon at the top of the shrouds, one hand searching frantically for a grip inside the maintop, and a foot kicking uselessly in the air below. His eyes were wide with fear, as though he was about to fall.

‘Here! Grab my hand!’ Tom stretched his arm down, and felt Simon’s fingers clutch around his wrist as the ship heeled steadily backwards; then, as it levelled out in the trough, Tom hauled his young cousin slowly into the top. It was wrong, he thought briefly, of the Master to send Simon up here on a day like this; Simon was not strong enough, even though he should be treated equally. Then, as they both gripped the rail, the ship began to rise to the next wave.

‘Maintop there! What ships do you see?’ The great voice of Robert Barrett boomed up at them from below. Tom glanced down, briefly, surprised at the force of the call from a man who had suddenly become so small. Then he steadied himself, gripping the rail hard as he gazed at the unending acres of unruly sea.

Grey and white. When he looked away from the ship he could see nothing but grey and white: the low, hurrying rags of cloud that followed them everywhere, darkening astern and to starboard into the black mists of rainsqualls that would be down on them soon, like wandering pockets of night; and below, the chaotic, tossing grey mountains of the sea, flecked with the furious, lethal spume of the white avalanching breakers; and everywhere, the huge, invisible fury of the wind. Nothing else at all; no other sail; not a single sign of the seven ships that had sailed so proudly out of Plymouth a few days before.

‘No ships, Master Barrett!’ he called down. ‘None, sir!’ His best maintop voice cracked as he yelled, ending in a high, embarrassing squeak so that he had to call again. But there was no laughter from the tiny figures on the quarter-deck below; each clung to his station as best he might, while the ship rolled and pitched to another wave; and then, as they neared its top, the Master cupped his hands and roared again, though half his words were snatched away by the gale.

‘Look again, lads ... eyes clear … any sail!’

‘There are none!’ Simon shouted, his voice hardly carrying the few inches to Tom's ear. ‘We're alone in all the world!’

‘Aye!’ So indeed it seemed; but while Simon trembled at the thought, to Tom it was one of awe and wonder. He had never imagined the sea to be so wide or wild, and yet he did not fear it, even now; Tom had no faculty for fear. For this, though he did not know it, Simon hated him. Because Tom did not understand fear, or feel it, Simon's nerves and horrors were an irritation to him, a sign that more than a mere twelvemonth separated them. Yet Tom liked his younger cousin well enough, and for the most part treated him with the bluff kindness he thought his father had expected, when he had put Simon in his care.

‘They must ... be sunk!’ came Simon's high voice again. ‘All drowned ... us next!’

‘Never!’ A wave caught them broad on the quarter, and they clung on as the ship rolled clumsily like the top-heavy barrel she was, nearly dropping them out of the maintop into the sea. 'She's a Queen's ship!' Tom added as they came up, shooting skywards and forwards over the forecastle. He had meant to say more; but a sudden surge of the sickness he had so far escaped prevented him from saying that the ancient
Jesus of Lubeck
was one of the proudest ships of Queen Elizabeth's navy, the flagship of Admiral Hawkins’ fleet. She could never sink; and yet the main deck was awash again, under a waste of white water, and this time, when it surfaced, one of the longboats that had been lashed there was gone, and the planks of another stove in. He saw the Master yelling down to the steersmen, heaving at the tiller in the darkness below the quarterdeck, to bring her high green and white painted stern round to the next grey mountain of annihilating water, before it caught her on her side and rolled her over completely.

‘A sail! A sail! Look, there!’ Simon jabbed with his finger to starboard, but Tom could see nothing; then, as the wave threw them into the air, he saw it too. Far off towards the horizon, a fleck of dirty white that was neither surf nor sky, but a rag of foresail that was keeping another ship's head downwind, as the triple-reefed scrap on their own foremast was doing. It was hardly a ship, compared to their own - more of a toy, a tiny fishing boat almost. Even as he saw it the sail vanished behind a wave; and then, a few seconds later, surged up again, so that for a moment they could make out the shape of the masts and part of the hull beneath.

‘A sail! A sail to starboard! A sail!’ Both boys yelled at once, their voices competing with the wind. Master Barrett looked up, and cupped his hands for another roar.

‘What ship?’

But it was some time before they could answer that. The ship vanished into a trough, and then the squall that had been following came upon them, blackening out the sky utterly, and lashing them with wind and hail, so that they could hardly see twenty yards, and did not notice when the reefed foresail was split to rags, so busy were they holding on. But at last it passed, and while grim seamen on the foremast struggled to replace the sail, a freak shaft of sunlight caught the distant ship, and Tom thought he recognised the red and gold quartering of the
Angel
, the smallest ship of the fleet, scarce bigger than the ferry that crossed from Dartmouth to Kingswear.

‘There you are!’ he laughed at Simon, when they had called down to the deck below. ‘If she can survive in this, surely we can! I'll wager there are worse storms still, after this!’

But it hardly seemed so. After a while Master Barrett called them down, another wild climb in which Simon twice clung to the shrouds in terror, unable to  move his hands or feet until Tom unfastened his terrified fingers one by one and moved his hand to the next rope below. Even though they tried to time it carefully, when they reached the ship’s waist they were caught in a swirl of green and white water that surged around their thighs and washed Simon up against the lee bulwarks. But when they reached the quarterdeck there was no chance of rest.

‘Get away below to the carpenter!’ the Master yelled. ‘All hands needed to plug the leaks!’

Below deck, the sudden stillness of the air in the sheltered cabin seemed to wrap around them like a soft, blessed blanket. But the wild motion of the lurching ship continued, and the darkness made it worse. In the great cabin it was not so bad, for some light came in through the streaming stern windows, to illuminate two of the gentlemen who lay slumped, green with misery, on the floor; but below, on the gundeck, the only light was that of a lantern. It swung crazily from a hook above their heads, and sent huge shadows of the struggling men there leaping around the walls.

It was not quite the only light. As Tom looked where the men were working under the direction of the ship’s carpenter, he saw a truly terrible sight. The ship’s timbers around the great oaken sternpost actually moved apart, leaving a gap as wide as a man's hand, or even wider! And through these gaps came huge torrential bursts of white water which brought fish – live fish! – flapping and swimming round their feet. The sternpost had the massive girth of a young oak, and the beams that joined it were little smaller, yet the sea was forcing them apart, like a child poking its fingers through a basket. The seamen were plugging the gaps with sails, and rolls and bolts of the precious cloth they had brought to trade with.

‘More cloth! Here, you two lads, come with me!' A small, hard hand gripped Tom's shoulder, steadying him against a further lurch of the ship and pulling the two boys back along the deck, to where another madly swinging lantern lit the hatch down into the further depths of the hold.

A leap of the lantern showed the twinkling eyes, dark curling hair and reddish beard of Francis Drake, the Master's mate, another cousin of his. Francis was a short sturdy man with a loud laugh and endless energy who had been at sea for most of his twenty-five years, learning his trade like a common sailor, the tough way.

‘Come on, lads, let's get that cloth! Woa, catch young Simon!’

Another combined pitch and roll of the ship sent Simon slithering into them, so that for a moment all three cousins hung there under the lantern together, held in place only by Francis's grip on a beam above his head. They formed a picture: the short, burly, bearded Francis; the sturdy, auburn Tom already as nearly as big, though ten years younger; and the slight, pale Simon, gasping with exhaustion like a fish out of water, skinny as a child beside them.

They waited until the ship steadied, then, Francis first, all three clambered down the ladder into the hold. A sudden torrent of water came sluicing after them from the stern, drenching Tom's head and shoulders as he climbed down.

The noise in the hold was worse, if anything, than that above. But it was a cacaphony of different sounds; here the screech and groan of tortured timber was only the background to the squeals and bleats of the pigs, goats, and fowls who were kept in the manger forward, and the bangs and clanks of the pumps that four groups of sailors laboured at without pause, up and down, trying to throw back into the sea a dribble of the surge that poured relentlessly through the gaping seams and down the hatches, washing around their feet to mock them as they worked.

‘I ... I can't. It's ... eeeeeugh!’ Tom bumped into Simon at the foot of the ladder and felt the tight, thin back bent in a violent retching that could bring no relief to a stomach long empty. Even Tom himself, his head bent below the beams in the semi-darkness, close and hot because of the lack of space and the sweat of the men and animals, felt a brief spasm of sickness here. He felt an urge to escape, to climb into the free, wild wind, rather than go down into the hold after Francis. Tom was not used to feeling doubt or fear, even for a moment; it made him impatient, so that he kicked Simon, and dragged him roughly upright by the hair.

‘Stop that, you great child! We need the cloth, or the whole ship'll founder, never mind you!’

‘But ... all right.’ Simon put up a hand weakly to clutch the roof, and stumbled ahead, past the barrels of food and powder, to where Francis was heaving at a great bolt of cloth.

'Here, you lads. Take that between you! I'll bring another!'

It was best English broadcloth, woven in Taunton and loaded with great expense and care only two weeks before, in Plymouth; now it was twice as heavy, sodden with seawater, fit only to be stuffed between the gaping planks of a near-sinking ship. It took the boys an age to lug it along the lurching deck to the ladder; and when it was there, it was all they and Francis combined could do to drag it up to the gundeck, where the sudden surge of water and shouts of men in the stern seemed louder than ever.

A rush of men fell on the cloth, cutting and folding it under the direction of Francis and the sailmaker, while the carpenter and others struggled to ram and nail each plug into place in the brief moments when each gap was open without the water pouring in. Twice more Tom and Simon went below to fetch cloth; but it was heartless, dreadful work, and worse for those plugging the gaps. One man lost his fingers when the timbers shut together, and a while later, when the great gap by the sternpost was at last filled, a huge sea burst through one of the gunports, smashing its lid and half-drowning them all.

But there was nothing for it but to start all over again; that and pray, or drown. Tom had long since lost his joy of the storm, and when he saw the slight, dapper figure of Admiral Hawkins among them, he was hardly surprised at the way young Simon cried out to him.

‘Oh, Master Hawkins! It’ll end soon, won't it, sir? Say 'twill end! We'll all drown, else!’

John Hawkins clung to the truck of the mizzen mast as the ship rolled alarmingly, peering around in the swaying shadows of lantern-lit gloom. He was a lithe, slender man, not above average height, and younger than many of the seamen he commanded; yet he was courtier, admiral, merchant-adventurer. It was he who had persuaded the Queen to lend them this great ship, as she had lent it before; he who invested in the venture and had pioneered the way twice before across the wild ocean; he who dared assert England's rights to trade with her dangerous ally, Spain; he who bore responsibility for success or failure; so it seemed hardly absurd that Simon should think he could conjure the weather, too, and save them from the storm. Older men than Simon turned, drenched, desperate, exhausted, to see whether they would find their own courage or their own despair reflected back from his dark, cunning, courtier's eyes.

‘Er’ll not stand much more of this, sir! Ship’s riddled like a sprained cask a'ready!’

‘Fast as we plugs 'er, the sea bursts the plug out!’

‘We've lost four bolts of cloth down yer, and little but water to show for it!’

John Hawkins watched them for a moment without answering, the lantern-light showing the sodden sea-cloak, the wet black glove around the mast, and the way the wind had curled and disordered the usually trim hair and beard on the small, round head. Yet his smile, when it came, was sardonic, unafraid.

‘The sea drives a hard bargain, it seems! But we shall have to pay up, my masters - there's naught else for it. Do you have more cloth, Master Drake?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘Then let us set to. These leaks
must
be plugged - we can only run before the wind just now. Hand me that maul, master carpenter!’ As he moved aft from the mast, he noticed Simon for the first time, the white, panic-stricken face lit by a swing of the lantern. ‘Come on, lad, you'll live to see worse than this.’

And so, for another long age, they slipped and struggled and cursed as they fought the inrushing sea in a welter of foam and darkness, until at last, somehow, there was less water, the main leaks only oozed steadily through their plugs where once they had spouted, and Simon was able to collapse, exhausted, with his back to the seeping hull, and sleep.

Tom ached to join him; but first, for some reason, he did not know why, he felt a need to go up on deck again, to the slippery, heaving quarterdeck, to feel the numbing blast and drenching rain of the scarcely slackened storm. He stared out into the night at the sudden luminous bursts of foam that fumed alongside out of the chaotic darkness of the savage, heaving sea. Up here, his heart sang and exulted with the fury of the storm, and he was not at all afraid. He stood near the Master, Robert Barrett, a massive, silent dark figure by the weather rail. Tom saw the water streaming off his cloak as he stood, conning the ship through the night, feeling what he could not see - the state of the tiny, reefed foresail that had been repaired, the movements of the men on the deck below at the tiller, the continually changing response of the top-heavy ship to the pressure of wind and wave.